Haiku is not only a Japanese short poem with a defined structure—it's also the name of an open-source recreation of BeOS, an alternative operating system originally developed in the mid-1990s. It was the brainchild of Jean-Louis Gassée, a flamboyant, enthusiastic manager and head of Apple France. He climbed his way up the executive ladder to become the head of “advanced product development and worldwide marketing” before being forced out of the company by then-CEO John Sculley in 1990.

Undaunted, Gassée decided he would create a brand new computer platform from scratch, including both custom hardware and a new operating system. Gassée was following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, who had attempted the same thing in with NeXT in 1985 when he was ousted from Apple.

The BeBox was released in October 1995. It was a curious beast, sporting dual 66MHz PowerPC 603e processors, a “GeekPort” for attaching custom electronic devices, and vertical “Blinkenlights,” LED strips that showed CPU usage. Only 1,800 BeBoxes were sold in total before Be, Inc. discontinued all hardware manufacturing and concentrated on selling the operating system by itself, initially for PowerPC Macintoshes.

In 1996, Apple was searching for a new operating system to replace its failed “Copland” project, and for a while BeOS was at the top of the list (this list included both Windows NT and Solaris, neither of which would have been especially appetizing for Apple fans). While negotiating a sale price, Gassée, exuding his typical bombastic confidence, told a reporter that “we’ve got Apple by the balls and we’re going to squeeze until it hurts.” Someone at Apple got wind of this and phoned a guy, who phoned another guy... who phoned up Steve Jobs at NeXT. The rest is history. “C’est la vie,” said Gassée, and switched the focus of BeOS to x86-based PCs.

BeOS reached its pinnacle of success in 2000 when the R5 version was released as a free download. However, few people upgraded to the $99 “Professional” version, and a last-ditch attempt to save the company by bundling BeOS with the Sony eVilla Internet Appliance failed to bring in the necessary cash. Be, Inc. sold all its assets to Palm, Inc. in November 2001 for $11 million.

Since then, a German company, yellowTAB, released a “new” version of BeOS called Zeta in 2005 (which I reviewed). However, the company never confirmed whether or not it had access to the BeOS source code. The company discontinued Zeta in 2007, stating that sales failed to live up to expectations.

With the legal status of the BeOS source code in limbo, it was up to an open-source group of hackers to try to recently keep the BeOS dream alive. Their project was originally named OpenBeOS, but trademark issues forced a name change. Haiku was chosen as a callback to the old error messages in BeOS’s built-in Web browser, which were delivered (appropriately) in haiku form. Today, the Haiku group aims not only to rebuild that operating system, but to also run application binaries originally designed for BeOS. With the team recently releasing version R1/Alpha 4.1, Ars decided to take the OS for a test drive

Installation

Haiku is available for download in a source code bundle: an .iso file that can be used to burn a live-booting and installation DVD, and a binary .image file that can be written directly to a USB thumb drive. The latter is the preferred method to check out Haiku. It can be run directly off the flash drive without needing to install it on the computer’s hard drive.

Copying the .image file to a thumb drive can be done with the Unix command ‘dd’ on Linux and OS X, or using the free ImageWriter program on Windows systems. Once the image has been copied to the USB drive, the computer immediately complains it cannot read the drive. In Windows’ case, it even offers to format it. The reason it can’t read the drive is that it is formatted with BeOS's native BFS file system. That's something only BeOS (and now, Haiku) knows how to read.

To start up the operating system, one simply inserts the thumb drive into a USB port and reboots. Most modern computers can be set to boot from the USB key by pressing the ‘Del’ key during the boot process then selecting the thumb drive manually in the boot priority menu.

The .image file creates a roughly 600MB partition for Haiku, leaving the rest of the USB drive unpartitioned and empty (mine had a 2GB capacity). For future releases, the Haiku team should seriously consider increasing the partition size, as the default distribution fills up that 600MB nearly completely with only a few megabytes free. The built-in partition manager application in Haiku lets you partition, format, and mount the rest of the space as another virtual drive, but it cannot dynamically resize partitions. This became an issue when testing.

Tested Hardware

I first tested the Haiku thumb drive on an older computer, a Core 2 Duo @ 1.8 GHz with 2GB RAM. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the computer went into an endless reboot loop as soon as it started accessing the thumb drive.

Next, I tried booting from my trusty MacBook (a late 2008 model, the first to come with the aluminum unibody, sporting 4GB of RAM). Sadly, the USB key refused to boot at all on this hardware. I tried booting from the Live DVD instead. I got as far as the boot screen, but then the computer hung and refused to proceed any further.

The last computer I tried was an ASUS P5K-VM motherboard with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU running at 2.4GHz and 8GB of RAM. This is my Media Center PC, hooked up directly to my television. Fortunately, Haiku booted on this hardware without any issue. Startup was very fast and took less than 15 seconds to get to a fully functional desktop. By default, the system booted into a resolution of 1024x768. Unfortunately, there was no option to switch to a widescreen resolution. Searching the forums, I found the system was using a default VESA driver and was not aware of my graphics card. I tried installing a (very) old BeOS NVIDIA unified driver. It appeared to install correctly, but the driver was not initialized on a reboot. According to the Haiku forums, the operating system will automatically support any NVIDIA graphics card up to a GeForce 7950, but cards newer than that (my graphics card is one of them) default to the VESA driver instead. Haiku does all 3D rendering in software mode and does not support 3D acceleration, so the lack of a driver didn't change the overall functionality of the operating system that much.

My other hardware was supported just fine: my network card, sound system, and various wireless USB mice and keyboards all worked automatically.

91 Reader Comments

There's still stuff to be commended in the design of Haiku today. Playing with tracker/deskbar, it's the UI that comes closest to recapturing that old spatial magic of the classic Mac OS finder, coupled with live queries based on the arbitrary extensible metadata of BFS. And, of course, there's teh snappy it was famous for, coming from not having the UI drawn on a single thread and a CPU scheduler optimised for interactive response.

BeOS 4.5 was a revelation back in my dial-up days. Sat on a "server" under the stairs it could dial-on-demand and even serve up my printer. Then I discovered NT4 Server and FreeSCO, so left it languishing. I did install it on a PPC Mac at one point in the early 2000's but there were never enough actual applications to justify it beyond tinkering.

Shocked (in a good way) to see BeBits still going! The site doesn't appear to have changed at all!

The "tinkering" part of me really wants to support Haiku, but the rational side just thinks that there isn't much point these days :-(

++ to Gypsumfantastic about the Tracker though - well ahead of its time and still how I prefer working. Or would if OSX and W8 managed to copy it.

BeOS seemed amazing back in the day and I still love it for nostalgia value, but I don't see the value in a new version of the OS. I won't be using it day to day, more likely loading it up in a VM for a bit and then closing it.

Then again I did download that RISC OS for my Raspberry Pi to play with...

"coming from not having the UI drawn on a single thread and a CPU scheduler optimized for interactive response"

The later perhaps, but the former is untrue. Ask anyone who writes high performance *anything*.

I don't know if it's still findable, but there was some heads-up UI performance tests in the NeXT Usenet forums comparing BeOS and NeXT back around 2000. NeXT crushed Be every time. And that's in spite of it drawing full-blown interpreted PS. Adding threads to the UI basically murdered Be's UI performance once you hit a threshold.

I have one of those magic blue boxes, and it really was a dream machine, especially for it's time (I think it still boots, though it is in storage these days). I used to develop adhoc audio applications for it, mainly. I do wish certain aspects of the dream had passed onto the dominant platforms that crushed it. The audio streaming interface was really the way it should be done, worked inter application impeccably (much cleaner and better designed than the proprietary ReWire api) ... likewise the MIDI subsystem ... on a system level the threading and messaging subsystems also awesome .... Perhaps an element of hubris killed it. Taught me a lot. Remembered and loved.

I loved me some BeOS back in the day and I miss BFS (shame the article didn't bring it up) every time I thnk of but even as a hold-out, there was only so many spinning tea pots you could state at before having to boot into an OS with developer support to do some actual work.

"coming from not having the UI drawn on a single thread and a CPU scheduler optimized for interactive response"

The later perhaps, but the former is untrue. Ask anyone who writes high performance *anything*.

I don't know if it's still findable, but there was some heads-up UI performance tests in the NeXT Usenet forums comparing BeOS and NeXT back around 2000. NeXT crushed Be every time. And that's in spite of it drawing full-blown interpreted PS. Adding threads to the UI basically murdered Be's UI performance once you hit a threshold.

I think NeXT being based on Unix gave it a real leg-up on BeOS in practical terms. I remember how amazing and promising BeOS looked at the time, but Apple made the right choice. And Unix/Linux has really come into its own as a standard in the Android/cloud era.

The Raspberry Pi comments are interesting.. $35 is a great price for keeping everything simple and separate while tinkering - or for completely useless toys. I know the Raspberry Pi was the result of hard work and very tailored manufacturing, and it could become a 'standard' in its own right (very likely in academia). So I can imagine Pi-based 'mascot' hardware packages - Buy the BeBox Nano for $40, signed by Jean-Louis Gassee! Buy a working mini Solaris workstation/coaster/mug warmer for $45! 3-button mouse included for $10 more! Soon perhaps ThinkGeek will have a working Hal-9000 that costs less than $500(ha). With prices plummeting and nostalgia rising, the possibilities are endless and frivolous.

I ran BeOS on a Pentium II back in the day, was even a "registered developer" so they sent me R3 and R4 for free. I still have the CDs and envelopes stashed away somewhere..

BeOS was always a snappy OS with advanced features and a well-designed UI, but I can't see much point today, unless they get an ARM version working (with codecs) so you can set up a Raspberry Pi as a media computer, or throw it on an old computer to use as a basic websurfing device.

BeOS seemed amazing back in the day and I still love it for nostalgia value, but I don't see the value in a new version of the OS. I won't be using it day to day, more likely loading it up in a VM for a bit and then closing it.

Then again I did download that RISC OS for my Raspberry Pi to play with...

When I look at the UI I just get nostalgic for my old Amiga. Not sure if good or bad... >.>

I remember hearing a lot about BeOS back in the end of the 90s. That was when I thought Microsoft and all its products was Evil Incarnate. I was looking for alternative OS after too much tinkering, tweaking and blind following of 'optimization guides' had basically destroyed my Windows installation (well, the family's computer, as I was too young to buy such expensive shiny stuff myself). I think I even saw a few boxed copies of BeOS for sale along Linux in a few high profile and mainstream electronic stores. In the end, I opted for Linux as I felt there would be more support and help and fun with it. I also remember reading articles about VMWare and its wonderful, if a bit heavy on system resources, emulator.Now that virtual machines are the bread and butter of most not personal computing devices, and even personal ones, I guess it might be far much easier to give Haiku a go, though I must say the horribly dated interface does it more harm than good.

I was one of the few who actually laid out cold hard cash for the "Professional" version. They went under a few months later. I was crushed. It was so much better than anything else available at the time it wasn't funny; I couldn't believe that people weren't flocking to it in droves.

Learned a lot about the power of a monopoly from that experience.

Also downloaded the Dano build they "released" after the sale. Those were the days. Never did pick up a copy of Zeta.

I don't have a single machine left here in the office that can run BeOS/Dano, I don't think. Maybe one, if it still works. Got plenty that should be able to handle Haiku.

I find the author's idea of porting it to the Pi very compelling; BeOS/Haiku was built for low-powered devices in the first place.

Under the screen shot of the Applications menu, I see that 'Show replicants' is enabled. If you forget your login password, does the computer ask you about upside-down tortoises in the desert as a security question?

I played around with it back in the day. It was the OS that "almost was"; Apple was about to buy Be, but Gasse kept pushing the price upward; then Gil Amelio saw that he had a chance to get both NeXT AND Steve Jobs, and the rest was history. There's no question that Apple made the right decision, because bringing back Jobs was FAR more valuable than either OS. But still, Be really had a great thing going, and it was sad to see them cast upon the ash heap of history.

I was enamored with Haiku for a short while, but the community is kind of strange. One thing I remember in particular is the common hatred of linux. Emotional attachment, not-invented-here syndrome, and the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia seem to create a sort of alternate reality in the community, where everyone else's problems are insurmountable showstoppers, whereas their own problems can be explained away at length.

It was fun to boot BeOS up back in the DP2 days, when boot times were an unheard-of 8 seconds or so. And the haiku error messages in the browser were cute. But, like signal11 indicated, there were just so many demos that could be run before reality set in. Everything was fast, because there was really nothing going on.

If I remember right, BeOS was so single-user-oriented that "baron" owned most files by default. I can't imagine anyone seriously trying to secure it for use in a production environment, and other than some rumors I heard of IBM using some to create live effects during one of the Olympics ('96?) I don't think anyone did. I also don't remember many hardware drivers ever getting made, which surely doomed it in the eyes of individual home users, as well. The few people I knew who were trying to use or develop for it were all terribly nice people, of course. (When Adamation saw the writing on the wall, they gave everyone who bought their PersonalStudio software a Windows port, for example.) But without at least these problem areas being addressed, I don't see why people are still pursuing it, when they could be using what they learned to build better interfaces or filesystems or whatever for active operating systems that have surpassing functionality.

Anyone remember Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line"? Turns out batmobiles are actually pretty useless for commuting, cross-country driving, really anything practical. They look and sound cool, sure, if you don't have to build, maintain, or actually use them. But users were spending too much time being Alfred, or waiting for a signal for something to do, than actually getting to be Batman.

BTW, Jeremy: I don't think Macbooks like booting from non-OSX external USB drives without something like rEFIt? Good thing you had other test platforms

I remember the good ole' days of the late 90s / early 2000s where there were tons of alternate OSes being made... AtheOS (made by one guy!), Syllable, SkyOS, Menuet OS (written entirely in assembly), Plan9, MorphOS, React OS, etc. Some of these appear to be still around. I was young and naive enough back then to be excited by some of them too.

I never understood why Haiku bothered with BeOS binary compatibility. It seems like a massive anchor to have to drag around. How does it benefit anybody in the year 2013? Any of the closed apps from back then are going to be woefully obsolete.

Has it really been that many years gone? I ran BeOS 5.0.3 full time (i.e. dedicated) for a while, bought every software package that was made for it (GoBe Productive, Civ, BeOS Professional, etc) and even made some money with it,

but times change and Win2k came out, and I made the switch. Still have a place in my heart for BeOS, like I do for the Pentax K1000. You can never forget the magic or re-create that 1st time when you know you're working with something special.

Never, since that 1st time with BeOS, have I ever felt excited about a PC, again.Man I miss those days. The wild frontier when anything seemed possible.

I did two years of college on BeOS R5 Professional, using GoBe Productive as my word processing engine. These were the heady days of 1999 and 2000, when COMDEX was still hot, overclocking your Celeron 300 to 450mhz was considered 1337, and guys with two physical CPUs were considered studs. Okay, maybe only in my world.

Anyway, BeOS died shortly thereafter (even as, I think, BeIA was ahead of its time and Gassee's vision of internet appliances is somewhat vindicated (cf:iPad)) but I saved my old 13GB Quantam drive housing my BeOS partition in the hopes that someday I could load it up in BeOS' spiritual successor, Haiku.

Fast forward to 2011, when I installed Windows Server 2008 R2 on my home PC. Unfortunately, Haiku R3 wouldn't load as VM. But with Windows 8 Pro + Hyper V 3 and Haiku R4, I'm off to the races. Forum and blog posts about running Haiku in a Hyper V VM state say they couldn't get the networking to work, but I was able to by deleting my Hyper V vSwitch and adding it again and assigning a static IP to the Haiku VM.

I echo the reviewer who says the interface hasn't aged well, but I still got a little tinkle down my spine when I held control (or is it shift?) and moved the yellow tab across one of the windows. I was impressed with the browser WebPositive and its ability to render multiple sites. My next task will be to somehow mount my old BeOS partition and see if I can copy some of the files off of it.

I hope Haiku keeps up the hard work!

PS: BeBits is, as you noted, full of bad links. But http://haikuware.com/ has most everything BeBits did and its local download links work. You can even download Quake!

I still wonder what would have happened if the massively multiprocessing model of Be had seen another decade of development. 8 second load times to the desktop when you were running a 450Mhz processor was and is still impressive. I like Windows 7, but it would be interesting to see how badly it chokes trying to accomplish the same thing.

I think someone could make some money porting the file manager from BE to Windows or Mac. It would be nice to go back to the Mac OS desktop days. I am still frustrated at Apple for ditching their Human Interface Design group's well thought out (and studied) guidelines.

I wish there were one 'alternative' OS other than OSX and Windows. I guess linux fits into that category on the strictest of terms, but the fragmentation of window managers, etc just make every flavor so different that the average person is horribly confused.

Running under a VM Haiku isn't just fast to boot. It feels fast to use, in a way I haven't had an OS behave since Windows 98 on a K6-2. And that was before I ditched the spinning disk on this machine.

Also: in this day and age why would you actually boot a new OS when virtualization is very, very mature. I guess if there's hardware support problems (like Haiku's lack of tablet support forcing you to have the vm capture the mouse) it should at least get booted during the review, but performance of a thumbdrive is hardly indicative either.

I wish there were one 'alternative' OS other than OSX and Windows. I guess linux fits into that category on the strictest of terms, but the fragmentation of window managers, etc just make every flavor so different that the average person is horribly confused.

A bit off topic but I can say the same about "enterprise-grade" programming languages. Java is just like linux on this point, the opposite is visual studio where "everything you need is here" is the rule.

I remember going to a Linux installfest about twelve years ago where on of the folks had a working BeBox on display. I don't quite remember why now but I thought it was one of the coolest computers I had ever seen. A couple weeks later I got BeOS and along with it came a big book explaining everything you could ever possibly want to know about it. I installed it and quickly realized that while it was super fast, there wasn't a whole lot you could really do with it. I played with it off and on for a few months then went back to my Linux/Windows dual boot and all but forgot about it.

I played around with it back in the day. It was the OS that "almost was"; Apple was about to buy Be, but Gasse kept pushing the price upward; then Gil Amelio saw that he had a chance to get both NeXT AND Steve Jobs, and the rest was history. There's no question that Apple made the right decision, because bringing back Jobs was FAR more valuable than either OS. But still, Be really had a great thing going, and it was sad to see them cast upon the ash heap of history.

It was the right decision in more ways than one. BeOS while nice didn't have a multi-user solution, something that was becoming more important in the computing field and and also didn't have a good security track record (it barely had a user base). Apple would have had to seriously re-work BeOS to be anything approaching what we now know to be a modern OS. With NeXT and its Unix core, Apple basically got all of that for free along with other things that BeOS was lacking at the time.

It was most definitely the right decision as I don;t believe Apple would have survived had they gone with BeOS. They would have had to spend way too much resources to get it to a more "modern" point imo and Apple didn't have the resources to spend at that point.